Tag: History

“War ends at the moment when peace permanently wins out. Not when the articles of surrender are signed or the last shot is fired, but when the last shout of a sidewalk battle fades, when the next generation starts to wonder whether the whole thing ever really happened.”

— Lee Sandlin

The Basics

In a classic American folktale, a stubborn railroad worker decides to prove his skill by competing with a drilling machine. John Henry, enraged to hear that machines might take his job, claims that his digging abilities are superior. A contest is arranged. He goes head to head with the new drill. The result is impressive — the drill breaks after three meters, whereas John Henry makes it to four meters in the same amount of time. As the other workers begin to celebrate his victory, he collapses and dies of exhaustion.

John Henry might have been victorious against the drill, but that small win was meaningless in the face of his subsequent death. In short, we can say that he won the battle but lost the war.

Winning a battle but losing the war is a military mental model that refers to achieving a minor victory that ultimately results in a larger defeat, rendering the victory empty or hollow. It can also refer to gaining a small tactical advantage that corresponds to a wider disadvantage.

One particular type of hollow victory is the Pyrrhic victory, which Wikipedia defines as a victory that “inflicts such a devastating toll on the victor that it is tantamount to defeat.” That devastating toll can come in the form of an enormous number of casualties, the wasting of resources, high financial costs, damage to land, and other losses. Or, in that folktale, the death of the railroad worker.

Another hollow victory occurs when you engage in a conventional war and prompt a response from an opponent who has significantly more firepower than you do. The attack on Pearl Harbor was considered a victory for the Japanese. However, by provoking an army with superior forces, they set something in motion they could not control.

While the concept of a hollow victory arises in military contexts, understanding the broader principle allows you to apply it to other areas of life. It can often be helpful in the context of non-zero-sum situations, in which both parties suffer even if one has technically succeeded.

We have won a battle but lost a war whenever we achieve some minor aim that leads to wider loss.

We have won a battle but lost a war whenever we achieve some minor (or even major) aim that leads to wider loss. We might win an argument with a partner over a small infraction, only to come across as hostile and damage the relationship. We may achieve a short-term professional goal by working overtime, only to harm our health and reduce our long-term productivity. We might pursue a particular career for the sake of money, but feel unfulfilled and miserable in the process.

“Grand strategy is the art of looking beyond the present battle and calculating ahead. It requires that you focus on your ultimate goal and plot to reach it.”

— Robert Greene, The 33 Strategies of War

The Original Pyrrhic Victory

The term “Pyrrhic victory” is named after the Greek king Pyrrhus of Epirus. Between 280 and 279 BC, Pyrrhus’s army managed to defeat the Romans in two major battles. Striding into Italy with 25,000 men and 20 elephants — a new sight for the Romans — Pyrrhus was confident that he could extend his empire. However, the number of lives lost in the process made the victory meaningless. According to Plutarch, Pyrrhus is said to have told a friend that another victory against the Romans would “utterly undo him.”

Pyrrhus did not have access to anywhere near enough potential recruits to replenish his army. He had, after all, lost most of his men, including the majority of his friends and commanders. Meanwhile, the Romans were only temporarily defeated. They could replace their lost soldiers with relative ease. Even worse, the two losses had enraged the Romans and made them more willing to continue fighting. The chastened king gathered his remaining troops and sailed back to Greece.

The Battle of Bunker Hill

A classic example of a Pyrrhic victory is the Battle of Bunker Hill, fought on June 17th, 1775, during the American Revolutionary War. Colonial and British troops grappled for control of the strategically advantageous Bunker Hill in Massachusetts.

Four days earlier, on June 13th, the colonial army received intelligence that the British were planning to take control of the hills around Boston, which would give them greater authority over the nearby harbor. About 1200 colonial soldiers situated themselves on the hills, while others spread throughout the surrounding area. The British army, realizing this, mounted an attack.

The British army succeeded in their aim after the colonial army ran out of ammunition. Yet the Battle of Bunker Hill was anything but a true victory, because the British lost a substantial number of men, including 100 of their officers. This left the British army depleted (having sustained 1000 casualties), low on resources, and without proper management.

This Pyrrhic victory was unexpected; the British troops had far more experience and outnumbered the colonial army by almost 2:1. The Battle of Bunker Hill sapped British morale but was somewhat motivating for the colonials, who had sustained less than half the number of casualties.

… the British were stopped by heavy fire from the colonial troops barricaded behind rail fences that had been stuffed with grass, hay, and brush. On the second or third advance, however, the attackers carried the redoubt and forced the surviving defenders, mostly exhausted and weaponless, to flee. …

If the British had followed this victory with an attack on Dorchester Heights to the South of Boston, it might have been worth the heavy cost. But, presumably, because of their severe losses and the fighting spirit displayed by the rebels, the British commanders abandoned or indefinitely postponed such a plan. Consequently, after Gen. George Washington took colonial command two weeks later, enough heavy guns and ammunition had been collected that he was able in March 1776 to seize and fortify Dorchester Heights and compel the British to evacuate Boston.… Also, the heavy losses inflicted on the British in the Battle of Bunker Hill bolstered the Americans' confidence and showed that the relatively inexperienced colonists could indeed fight on par with the mighty redcoats of the British army.

Bunker Hill was a Pyrrhic victory, its strategic effect practically nil since the two armies remained in virtually the same position they had held before. Its consequences, nevertheless, cannot be ignored. A force of farmers and townsmen, fresh from their fields and shops, with hardly a semblance of orthodox military organization, had met and fought on equal terms with a professional British army. …[N]ever again would British commanders lightly attempt such an assault on Americans in fortified positions.

“I wish we could sell them another hill at the same price.”

— Nathanael Greene, leader of the colonial army

The Battle of Borodino

Fought on September 7, 1812, the Battle of Borodino was the bloodiest day of the Napoleonic Wars. The French army (led by Napoleon) sought to invade Russia. Roughly a quarter of a million soldiers fought at the Battle of Borodino, with more than 70,000 casualties. Although the French army succeeded in forcing the Russians into retreat, their victory was scarcely a triumphant one. Both sides ended up depleted and low on morale without having achieved their respective aims.

The Battle of Borodino is considered a Pyrrhic victory because the French army destroyed itself in the process of capturing Moscow. The Russians had no desire to surrender, and the conflict was more costly for the French than for their opponent.
By the time Napoleon's men began their weary journey back to France, they had little reason to consider themselves victorious. The Battle of Borodino had no clear purpose, as no tactical advantage was gained. Infighting broke out and Napoleon eventually lost both the war and his role as leader of France.

History has shown again and again that attempting to take over Russia is rarely a good idea. Napoleon was at a serious disadvantage to begin with. The country's size and climate made tactical movements difficult. Bringing supplies in proved nearly impossible, and the French soldiers easily succumbed to cold, starvation, and infectious diseases. Even as they hastened to retreat, the Russian army recovered its lost men quickly and continued to whittle away at the remaining French soldiers. Of the original 95,000 French troops, a mere 23,000 returned from Russia (exact figures are impossible to ascertain due to each side's exaggerating or downplaying the losses). The Russian approach to defeating the French is best described as attrition warfare – a stubborn, unending wearing down. Napoleon might have won the Battle of Borodino, but in the process he lost everything he had built during his time as a leader and his army was crushed.

Pyrrhic victories often serve as propaganda in the long term – for the losing side, not the victors.

Something we can note from both Borodino and Bunker Hill is that Pyrrhic victories often serve as propaganda in the long term – for the losing side, not for the victors. As the adage goes, history is written by winners. A Latin saying, ad victorem spolias – to the victor belong the spoils – exemplifies this idea. Except that it doesn't quite ring true when it comes to Pyrrhic victories, which tend to be a source of shame for the winning side. In the case of Borodino, it became an emblem of patriotism and pride for the Russians.

“[I]t is much better to lose a battle and win the war than to win a battle and lose the war. Resolve to keep your eyes on the big ball.”

— David J. Schwartz, The Magic of Thinking Big

Hollow Victories in Business

A company has won a Pyrrhic victory when it leverages all available resources to take over another company, only to be ruined by the financial costs and the loss of key employees. Businesses can also ruin themselves over lawsuits that drain resources, distract managers, and get negative attention in the press.

American Apparel is one instance of a company ending up bankrupt, partially as a result of mounting legal fees. The exact causes of the company’s downfall are not altogether understood, though a number of lawsuits are believed to have been a major factor. It began with a series of sexual harassment lawsuits against founder Dov Charney.

American Apparel’s board of directors fired Charney after the growing fees associated with defending him began harming the company’s finances (as well as its reputation). Charney responded by attempting a hostile takeover, as unwilling to surrender control of the company he founded as Czar Alexander was to surrender Moscow to Napoleon. More lawsuits followed as American Apparel shareholders and board members seemingly sued everyone in sight and were sued by suppliers, by more than 200 former employees, and by patent holders.

As everyone involved focused on winning their respective battles, the company ended up filing for bankruptcy and losing the war. In short, everyone suffered substantial losses, from Charney himself to the many factory workers who were made redundant.

Hollow Victories in Court Cases

Hollow victories are common in the legal system. For example, consider the following scenarios:

A divorced couple engages in a lengthy, tedious legal battle over the custody of their children. Eventually, they are given shared custody. Yet the tense confrontations associated with the court case have alienated the children from their parents and removed tens of thousands of dollars from the collective purse.

A man unknowingly puts up trees that slightly cross over into his neighbor's property. The man tries to come to a compromise by perhaps trimming the trees or allowing the neighbor to cross into his property in exchange for leaving the trees up. No dice; the neighbor sticks to his guns. Unable to resolve the matter, the neighbor sues the man and wins, forcing him to cut down the trees and pay all legal expenses. While the neighbor has technically won the case, he now has an enemy next door, and enemies up and down the street who think he's a Scrooge.

A freelance illustrator discovers that her work has been used without permission or payment by a non-profit group that printed her designs on T-shirts and sold them, with the proceeds going to charity. The illustrator sues them and wins for copyright infringement, but costs herself and the charity substantial legal fees. Unhappy that the illustrator sued a charity instead of making a compromise, the public boycotts her and she has trouble selling her future work.

A well-known business magnate discovers that his children are suing him for the release of trust fund money they believe they are owed. He counter-sues, arguing publicly that his children are greedy and don't deserve the money. He wins the case on a legal technicality, but both his public image and his relationships with his children are tarnished. He's kept his money, but not his happiness.

A notable instance of a legal Pyrrhic victory was the decade-long McLibel case, the longest running case in English history. The fast-food chain McDonald's attempted to sue two environmental activists, Helen Steel and David Morris, over leaflets they distributed. McDonald's claimed the contents of the leaflets were false. Steel and Morris claimed they were true.

Court hearings found that both parties were both wrong – some of the claims were verifiable; others were fabricated. After ten years of tedious litigation and negative media attention, McDonald's won the case, but it was far from worthwhile. The (uncollected) £40,000 settlement they were awarded was paltry compared to the millions the legal battle had cost the company. Meanwhile, Steel and Morris chose to represent themselves and spent only £30,000 (both had limited income and did not receive Legal Aid).

Although McDonald's did win the case, it came with enormous costs, both financially and in reputation. The case attracted a great deal of media attention as a result of its David-vs.-Goliath nature. The idea of two unemployed activists taking on an international corporation had an undeniable appeal, and the portrayals of McDonald's were unanimously negative. The case did far more harm to their reputation than a few leaflets distributed in London would have. At one point, McDonald's attempted to placate Steel and Morris by offering to donate money to a charity of their choice, provided that they stopped criticizing the company publicly and did so only “in private with friends.” The pair responded that they would accept the terms if McDonald's halted any form of advertising and staff recommended it only “in private with friends.”

“Do not be ashamed to make a temporary withdrawal from the field if you see that your enemy is stronger than you; it is not winning or losing a single battle that matters, but how the war ends.”

— Paulo Coelho, Warrior of the Light

Hollow Victories in Politics

Theresa May’s General Election win is a perfect example of a political Pyrrhic victory, as is the Brexit vote the year prior.

Much like Napoleon at Borodino, David Cameron achieved his aims, only to lose his role as a leader in the process. And much like the French soldiers who defeated the Russians at Borodino, only to find themselves limping home through snow and ice, the triumphant Leave voters now face a drop in wages and general quality of life, making the fulfilment of their desire to leave the European Union seem somewhat hollow. Elderly British people (the majority of whom voted to leave) must deal with dropping pensions and potentially worse healthcare due to reduced funding. Voters won the battle but at a cost that is unknown.

Even before the shock of the Brexit vote had worn off, Britain saw a second dramatic Pyrrhic victory: Theresa May’s train-wreck General Election. Amid soaring inflation, May aimed to win a clear majority and secure her leadership. Although she was not voted out of office, her failure to receive unanimous support only served to weaken her position. Continued economic decline has weakened it further.

“Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win.”

— Sun Tzu, The Art of War

How We Can Avoid Hollow Victories in Our Lives

One important lesson we can learn from hollow victories is the value of focusing on the bigger picture, rather than chasing smaller goals.

One way to avoid winning a battle but losing the war is to think in terms of opportunity costs. Charlie Munger has said that “All intelligent people use opportunity cost to make decisions”; maybe what he should have said is that “All intelligent people should use opportunity cost to make decisions.”

Consider a businessman, well versed in opportunity cost economics, who chooses to work late every night instead of spending time with his family, whom he then alienates and eventually becomes distanced from. The opportunity cost of the time spent at the office between 7-10 pm wasn't just TV, or dinner, or any other thing he would have done were he at home. It was a good long-term relationship with his wife and children! Talk about opportunity costs! Putting in the late hours may have helped him with the “battle” of business, but what about the “war” of life? Unfortunately, many people realize too late that they paid too high a price for their achievements or victories.

Hollow victories can occur as a result of a person or party focusing on a single goal – winning a lawsuit, capturing a hill, winning an election – while ignoring the wider implications. It's like looking at the universe by peering into one small corner of space with a telescope.

As was noted earlier, this mental model isn't relevant just in military, legal, or political contexts; hollow victories can occur in every part of our lives, including relationships, health, personal development, and careers. Understanding military tactics and concepts can teach us a great deal about being effective leaders, achieving our goals, maintaining relationships, and more.

It's obvious that we should avoid Pyrrhic victories wherever possible, but how do we do that? In spite of situations differing vastly, there are some points to keep in mind:

Zoom out to see the big picture. By stepping back when we get too focused on minutiae, we can pay more attention to the war, not just the battle. Imagine that you are at the gym when you feel a sharp pain in your leg. You ignore it and finish the workout, despite the pain increasing with each rep. Upon visiting a doctor, you find you have a serious injury and will be unable to exercise until it heals. If you had focused on the bigger picture, you would have stopped the workout, preventing a minor injury from getting worse, and been able to get back to your workouts sooner.

Keep in mind core principles and focus on overarching goals. When Napoleon sacrificed thousands of his men in a bid to take control of Moscow, he forgot his core role as the leader of the French people. His own country should have been the priority, but he chose to chase more power and ended up losing everything. When we risk something vital – our health, happiness, or relationships – we run the risk of a Pyrrhic victory.

Recognize that we don't have to lose our minds just because everyone else has. As Warren Buffett once said, “be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful.” Or, as Nathan Rothschild wrote, “great fortunes are made when cannonballs fall in the harbor, not when violins play in the ballroom.” When others are thrashing to win a battle, we would do well to pay attention to the war. What can we notice that they ignore? If we can't (or don't want to) resolve the turmoil, how can we benefit from it?

Recognize when to give up. We cannot win every battle we engage in, but we can sometimes win the war. In some situations, the optimum choice is to withdraw or surrender to avoid irreparable problems. The goal is not the quick boost from a short-term victory; it is the valuable satisfaction of long-term success.

Remember that underdogs can win – or at least put up a good fight. Remember what the British learned the hard way at Bunker Hill, and what it cost McDonald's to win the McLibel case. Even if we think we can succeed against a seemingly weaker party, that victory can come at a very high cost.

We all get lucky. Once in a while we do something really stupid that could have resulted in death, but didn’t. Just the other day, I saw someone who was texting walk out into oncoming traffic, narrowly avoiding the car whose driver slammed on the brakes. As the adrenaline starts to dissipate, we realize that we don’t ever want to be in that situation again. What can we do? We can make the most of our second chances by building margins of safety into our lives.

The concept is a cornerstone of engineering. Engineers design systems to withstand significantly more emergencies, unexpected loads, misuse, or degradation than would normally be expected.

Take a bridge. You are designing a bridge to cross just under two hundred feet of river. The bridge has two lanes going in each direction. Given the average car size, the bridge could reasonably carry 50 to 60 cars at a time. At 4,000 pounds per car, your bridge needs to be able to carry at least 240,000 pounds of weight; otherwise, don’t bother building it. So that’s the minimum consideration for safety — but only the worst engineer would stop there.

Can anyone walk across your bridge? Can anyone park their car on the shoulder? What if cars get heavier? What if 20 cement trucks are on the bridge at the same time? How does the climate affect the integrity of your materials over time? You don’t want the weight capacity of the bridge to ever come close to the actual load. Otherwise, one seagull decides to land on the railing and the whole structure collapses.

Considering these questions and looking at the possibilities is how you get the right information so you can adjust your specs to build in a margin of safety. That’s the difference between what your system is expected to withstand and what it actually could. So when you are designing a bridge, the first step is to figure out the maximum load it should ever see (bumper-to-bumper vehicles, hordes of tourist groups, and birds perched wing to wing), and then you design for at least double that load.

Knowing that the infrastructure was designed to withstand significantly more than the anticipated maximum load makes us happy when we are on bridges, or in airplanes, or jumping on the bed in our second-story bedroom. We feel confident that many smart people have conspired to make these activities as safe as possible. We’re so sure of this that it almost never crosses our minds. Sure, occasional accidents happen. But it is remarkably reassuring that these structures can withstand quite a bit of the unexpected.

So how do we make ourselves a little more resilient? Less susceptible to the vagaries of change? Turns out that engineers aren’t the only ones obsessed with building in margins of safety. Spies are pretty good at it, too, and we can learn a lot from them.

Operation Kronstadt, by Harry Ferguson, chronicles the remarkable story of Paul Dukes, the only British secret agent working in Russia in 1919, and the equally amazing adventures of the small team that was sent in to rescue him.

Paul Dukes was not an experienced spy. He was actually a pianist. It was his deep love of Russian culture that led to him to approach his government and volunteer for the mission of collecting information on Bolshevik activities in St. Petersburg. As Ferguson writes, “Paul had no military experience, let alone any experience of intelligence work and yet they were going to send him back into one of the toughest espionage environments in the world.”

However, MI6, the part of British Intelligence that Paul worked for, wasn’t exactly the powerful and well-prepared agency that it’s portrayed as today. Consider this description by Ferguson: “having dragged Paul out of Russia, MI6 did not appear to have given much thought to how he should get back or how he would survive once he got there: ‘As to the means whereby you gain access to the country, under what cover you will live there, and how you will send out reports, we shall leave it to you, being best informed as to the conditions’.”

So off went Paul into Russia, not as a musician but as a spy. No training, no gadgets, no emergency network, no safe houses. Just a bunch of money and sentiments of ‘good luck’. So it is all the more amazing that Paul Dukes turned out to be an excellent spy. After reading his story, I think the primary reason for this is that he learned extremely quickly from his experiences. One of the things he learned quickly was how to build margins of safety into his tradecraft.

There is no doubt that the prospect of death wakes us up. We don’t often think about how dangerous something can be until we almost die doing it. Then, thanks to our big brains that let us learn from experience, we adapt. We recognize that if we don’t, we might not be so lucky next time. And no one wants to rely on luck as a survival strategy.

Imagine you are in St. Petersburg in 1919. What you have going for you is that you speak the language, understand the culture, and know the streets. Your major problem is that you have no idea how to start this spying thing. How do you get contacts and build a network in a city that is under psychological siege? The few names you have been given come from dubious sources at the border, and the people attached to those names may have been compromised, arrested, or both. You have nowhere to sleep at night, and although you have some money, it can’t buy anything, not even food, because there is nothing for sale. The whole country is on rations.

Not to mention, if by some miracle you actually get a few good contacts who give you useful information, how do you get it home? There are no cell phones or satellites. Your passport is fake and won’t hold up to any intense scrutiny, yet all your intelligence has to be taken out by hand from a country that has sealed its borders. And it’s 1919. You can’t hop on a plane or drive a car. Train or foot are your only options.

This is what Paul Dukes faced. Daunting to be sure. Which is why his ultimate success reads like the improbable plot of a Hollywood movie. Although he made mistakes, he learned from them as they were happening.

Consider this tense moment as described by Ferguson:

The doorbell in the flat rang loudly and Paul awoke with a start.

He had slept late. Stepanova had kindly allowed him sleep in one of the spare beds and she had even found him an old pair of Ivan's pyjamas. There were no sheets, but there were plenty of blankets and Paul had been cosy and warm. Now it was 7.45 a.m., and here he was half-asleep and without his clothes. Suppose it was the Cheka [Russian Bolshevik Police] at the door? In a panic he realised that he had no idea what to do. The windows of the apartment were too high for him to jump from and like a fool he had chosen a hiding place with no other exits. … He was reduced to waiting nervously as he stood in Ivan's pyjamas whilst Stepanova shuffled to the door to find out who it was. As he stood there with his stomach in knots, Paul swore that he would never again sleep in a place from which there was only one exit.

One exit was good enough for normal, anticipated use. But one exit wouldn't allow him to adapt to the unexpected, the unusual load produced by the appearance of the state police. So from then on, his sleeping accommodations were chosen with a minimum margin of safety of two exits.

This type of thinking dictated a lot of his actions. He never stayed at the same house more than two nights in a row, and often moved after just one night. He arranged for the occupants to signal him, such as by placing a plant in the window, if they believed the house was unsafe. He siloed knowledge as much as he could, never letting the occupants of one safe house know about the others. Furthermore, as Ferguson writes:

He also arranged a back-up plan in case the Cheka finally got him. He had to pick one trustworthy agent … and soon Paul began entrusting her with all the details of his movements and told her at which safe house he would be sleeping so that if he did disappear MI6 would have a better idea of who had betrayed him. He even used her as part of his courier service and she hid all his reports in the float while he was waiting for someone who could take them out of the country.

Admittedly this plan didn’t provide a large margin of safety, but at least he wasn’t so arrogant as to assume he was never going to get captured.

Large margins of safety are not always possible. Sometimes they are too expensive. Sometimes they are not available. Dukes liked to have an extra identity handy should some of his dubious contacts turn him in, but this wasn’t always an option in a country that changed identity papers frequently. Most important, though, he was aware that planning for the unexpected was his best chance of staying alive, even if he couldn’t always put in place as large a margin of safety as he would have liked. And survival was a daily challenge, not something to take for granted.

The disaster at the Fukushima nuclear power plant taught us a lot about being cavalier regarding margins of safety. The unexpected is just that: not anticipated. That doesn’t mean it is impossible or even improbable. The unexpected is not the worst thing that has happened before. It is the worst thing, given realistic parameters such as the laws of physics, that could happen.

In the Fukushima case, the margin of safety was good enough to deal with the weather of the recent past. But preparing for the worst we have seen is not the same as preparing for the worst.

The Fukushima power plant was overwhelmed by a tsunami, creating a nuclear disaster on par with Chernobyl. Given the seismic activity in the area, although a tsunami wasn’t predictable, it was certainly possible. The plant could have been designed with a margin of safety to better withstand a tsunami. It wasn’t. Why? Because redundancy is expensive. That’s the trade-off. You are safer, but it costs more money.

Sometimes when the stakes are low, we decide the trade-off isn’t worth it. For instance, maybe we wouldn’t pay to insure a wedding ring that wasn’t expensive. You would think, however, that power plants wouldn’t cut it close. The consequences of a lost ring are some emotional pain and the cost of a new one. The consequences of a nuclear accident are exponentially higher. Lives are lost, and the environment corrupted. In the Fukushima case, the world will be dealing with the negative effects for a long time.

What decisions would you make differently if you were factoring safety margins into your life? To be fair, you can’t put them everywhere. Otherwise, your life might be all margin and no living. But you can identify the maximum load your life is currently designed to withstand and figure out how close to it you are coming.

For example, having your expenses equal 100 percent of your income is allowing you no flexibility in the load you have to carry. A job loss, a bad flood in your neighborhood, or significant sickness are all unexpected events that would change the load your financial structure has to support. Without a margin of safety, such as a healthy savings or investment account, you could find your structure collapsing, compromising the roof over your head.

The idea is to identify the unlikely but possible risks to your survival and build margins of safety that will allow you to continue your lifestyle should these things come to pass. That way, a missed paycheck will be easily absorbed instead of jeopardizing your ability to put food on the table.

To figure out where else you should build margins of safety into your life, think of the times you’ve been terrified and desperate. Those might be good places to start learning from experience and making the most of your second chances.

“History is written by the winners” is the popular view. But your winner may not be my winner. A lot depends on the narrative you are trying to build.

History is rewritten all the time.

Sometimes it is rewritten because new information has come to light, perhaps from an archeological find or previously classified documents. When this happens, it is exciting. We joyfully anticipate that more information will deepen our understanding.

But rewriting frequently happens in the service of building a cultural or national narrative. We highlight bits of the past that support our perceived identities and willfully ignore the details that don’t fit. We like our history uncomplicated. It’s hard for us to understand our groups or our countries, and by extension ourselves, as both good and not-good at the same time.

Culture is collective memory. It’s the interwoven stories that we use to explain who we are as nations, organizations, or just loosely formed groups.

Many of us belong to multiple cultural groups, but only one national group. Margaret MacMillan, in The Uses and Abuses of History, explains that “Collective memory is more about the present than the past because it is integral to how the group sees itself.” And “while collective memory is usually grounded in fact, it need not be.”

We have seen how people justify all kinds of mistakes to preserve the personal narratives they are invested in, and groups also engage in this behavior. Countries rewrite their histories, from the textbook up, to support how they see themselves now. Instinctively we may recoil from this idea, believing that it’s better to turn over all the rocks and confront what is lurking underneath. However, as MacMillan writes, “It can be dangerous to question the stories people tell about themselves because so much of our identity is both shaped by and bound up with our history. That is why dealing with the past, in deciding on which version we want, or on what we want to remember and to forget, can become so politically charged.”

For example, when Canada’s new war museum opened, controversy immediately ensued because part of the World War II exhibit called attention “to the continuing debate over both the efficacy and the morality of the strategy of the Royal Air Force’s bomber command, which sought to destroy Germany’s capacity to fight on by massive bombing of German industrial and civilian targets.” RAF veterans were outraged that their actions were considered morally ambiguous. Critics of the exhibit charged that the veterans should have the final say because, after all, “they were there.”

We can see that this rationale makes no sense. Galilean relativity shows that the pilots who flew the bombing campaigns are actually the least likely to have an objective understanding of the events. And the ends don’t always justify the means. It is possible to do bad things in the pursuit of morally justified outcomes.

MacMillan warns that the danger of abusing history is that it “flattens out the complexity of human experience and leaves no room for different interpretations of the past.”

Which leaves us asking, What do we want from history? Do we want to learn from it, with the hopes that in doing so we will avoid mistakes by understanding the experiences of others? Or do we want to practice self-justification on a national level, reinforcing what we already believe about ourselves in order to justify what we did and what we are doing? After all, “you could almost always find a basis for your claims in the past if you looked hard enough.”

As with medicine, there is a certain fallibility to history. Our propensity to fool ourselves with self-justified narratives is hard to overcome. If we selectively use the past only to reinforce our claims in the present, then the situation becomes precarious when there is pressure to change. Instead of looking as objectively as possible at history, welcoming historians who challenge us, we succumb to confirmation bias, allowing only those interpretations that are consistent with the narrative we are invested in.

Consider what MacMillan writes about nationalism, which “is a very late development indeed in terms of human history.”

It all started so quietly in the nineteenth century. Scholars worked on languages, classifying them into different families and trying to determine how far back into history they went. They discovered rules to explain changes in language and were able to establish, at least to their own satisfaction, that texts centuries old were written in early forms of, for example, German or French. Ethnographers like the Grimm brothers collected German folk tales as a way of showing that there was something called the German nation in the Middle Ages. Historians worked assiduously to recover old stories and pieced together the history of what they chose to call their nation as though it had an unbroken existence since antiquity. Archaeologists claimed to have found evidence that showed where such nations had once lived, and where they had moved to during the great waves of migrations.

The cumulative result was to create an unreal yet influential version of how nations formed. While it could not be denied that different peoples, from Goths to Slavs, had moved into and across Europe, mingling as they did so with peoples already there, such a view assumed that at some point, generally in the Middle Ages, the music had stopped. The dancing pieces had fallen into their chairs, one for the French, another for the Germans and yet another for the Poles. And there history had fixed them as “nations.” German historians, for example, could depict an ancient German nation whose ancestors had lived happily in their forests from before the time of the Roman Empire and which at some time, probably in the first century A.D., had become recognisably “German.” So — and this was the dangerous question — what was properly the German nation’s land? Or the land of any other “nation”? Was it where the people now lived, where they had lived at the time of their emergence in history, or both?

Would the scholars have gone on with their speculations if they could have seen what they were preparing the way for? The bloody wars that created Italy and Germany? The passions and hatred that tore apart the old multinational Austria-Hungary? The claims, on historical grounds, by new and old nations after World War I for the same pieces of territory? The hideous regimes of Hitler and Mussolini with their elevation of the nation and the race to the supreme good and their breathtaking demands for the lands of others?

When we selectively reach back into the past to justify claims in the present, we reduce the complexity of history and of humanity. This puts us in an awkward position because the situations we are confronted with are inherently complex. If we cut ourselves off from the full scope of history because it makes us uncomfortable, or doesn’t fit with the cultural narrative in which we live, we reduce our ability to learn from the past and apply those lessons to the situations we are facing today.

MacMillan says, “There are also many lessons and much advice offered by history, and it is easy to pick and choose what you want. The past can be used for almost anything you want to do in the present. We abuse it when we create lies about the past or write histories that show only one perspective. We can draw our lessons carefully or badly. That does not mean we should not look to history for understanding, support and help; it does mean that we should do so with care.”

We need to accept that people can do great things while still having flaws. Our heroes don’t have to be perfect, and we can learn just as much from their imperfections as from their achievements.

We have to allow that there are at least two sides to every story, and we have to be willing to listen to both. There are no conflicts in which one side doesn’t feel morally justified in their actions; that’s why your terrorist can be my freedom fighter. History can be an important part of bridging this divide only if we are willing to lift up all the rocks and shine our lights on what is lurking underneath.

If we are to learn from the past, does the account of it have to be true? One would like to think so. Otherwise you might be preparing for the wrong battle. There you are, geared up for mountains, and instead you find swamps. You've done a bunch of reading, trying to understand the terrain you are about to enter, only to find it useless. The books must have been written by crazy people. You are upset and confused. Surely there must be some reliable, objective account of the past. How are you supposed to prepare for the possibilities of the future if you can't trust the accuracy of the reports on anything that has come before?

For why do we study history, anyway? Why keep a record of things that have happened? We fear that if we don't, we are doomed to repeat history; but often that doesn't seem to stop us from repeating it. And we have an annoying tendency to remember only the things which don't really challenge or upset us. But still we try to capture what we can, through museums and ceremonies and study, because somehow we believe that eventually we will come to learn something about why things happen the way they do. And armed with this knowledge, we might even be able to shape our future.

Of course, it's not that simple, and — spoiler alert — Tolstoy never figured it out. But Berlin's analysis can illuminate the challenges we face with history and help us find something to learn from.

Tolstoy's main problem with historical efforts at the time was that they were “nothing but a collection of fables and useless trifles. … History does not reveal causes; it presents only a blank succession of unexplained events.” Seen like this, the study of history is a waste of time, other than for trivia games or pub quizzes. Being able to recite what happened is supremely uninteresting if you can't begin to understand why it happened in the first place.

But Tolstoy was also an expert at tearing down the theories of anyone who attempted to make sense of history and provide the why. He thought that they “must be imposters, since no theories can possibly fit the immense variety of possible human behavior, the vast multiplicity of minute, undiscoverable causes and effects which form that interplay of men and nature which history purports to record.”

History is more than just factoids, but its complexity makes it difficult for us to learn exactly why things happened the way they did.

And therein lies the spectrum of the problem for Tolstoy. History is more than just factoids, but its complexity makes it difficult for us to learn exactly why things happened the way they did. A battle is more than dates and times, but trying to trace the real impact of the decisions of Napoleon or Churchill is a fool's errand. There is too much going on – too many decisions and interactions happening in every moment – for us to be able to conclude cause and effect with any certainty. After leaving an ice cube to melt on a table, you can't untangle exactly what happened with each molecule from the puddle. That doesn't mean we can't learn from history; it means only that we need to be careful with the lessons we draw and the confidence we have in them.

Berlin explains:

There is a particularly vivid simile [in War and Peace] in which the great man is likened to the ram whom the shepherd is fattening for slaughter. Because the ram duly grows fatter, and perhaps is used as a bellwether for the rest of the flock, he may easily imagine that he is the leader of the flock, and that the other sheep go where they go solely in obedience to his will. He thinks this and the flock may think it too. Nevertheless the purpose of his selection is not the role he believes himself to play, but slaughter – a purpose conceived by beings whose aims neither he nor the other sheep can fathom. For Tolstoy, Napoleon is just such a ram, and so to some degree is Alexander, and indeed all the great men of history.

Arguing against this view of history was N. I. Kareev, who said:

…it is men, doubtless, who make social forms, but these forms – the ways in which men live – in their turn affect those born into them; individual wills may not be all-powerful, but neither are they totally impotent, and some are more effective than others. Napoleon may not be a demigod, but neither is he a mere epiphenomenon of a process which would have occurred unaltered without him.

This means that studying the past is important for making better decisions in the future. If we can't always follow the course of cause and effect, we can at least discover some very strong correlations and act accordingly.

We have a choice between these two perspectives: Either we can treat history as an impenetrable fog, or we can figure out how to use history while accepting that each day might reveal more and we may have to update our thinking.

Sound familiar? Sounds a lot like the scientific method to me – a preference for updating the foundation of knowledge versus being adrift in chaos or attached to a raft that cannot be added to.

Berlin argues that Tolstoy spent his life trying to find a theory strong enough to unify everything. A way to build a foundation so strong that all arguments would crumble against it. Although that endeavor was ambitious, we don't need to fully understand the why of history in order to be able to learn from it. We don't need the foundation of the past to be solid and fixed in order to gain some insight into our future. We can still find some truth in history.

How?

Funnily enough, Berlin clarifies that Tolstoy “believed that only by patient empirical observation could any knowledge be obtained.” But he also believed “that simple people often know the truth better than learned men, because their observation of men and nature is less clouded by empty theories.”

Unhelpfully, Tolstoy's position amounts to “the more you know, the less you learn.”

The answer to finding truth in history is not to be found in Tolstoy's writing. He was looking for “something too indivisibly simple and remote from normal intellectual processes to be assailable by the instruments of reason, and therefore, perhaps, offering a path to peace and salvation.” He never was able to conclude what that might be.

But there might be an answer in how Berlin interprets Tolstoy's major dissonance in life, the discrepancy that drove him and was never resolved. Tolstoy “tried to resolve the glaring contradiction between what he believed about men and events, and what he thought he believed, or ought to believe.”

Finding truth in history is about understanding that this truth is not absolute. In this sense, truth is based on perspective. The perspective of the person who captured it and the person interpreting it. And the perspective of the translators and editors and primary sources. We don't get to be invisible observers of moments in the past, and we don't get to go into other minds. The best we can do is keep our eyes open and keep our biases in check. And what history can teach us is found not just in the moments it tries to describe, but also in what we choose to look at and how we choose to represent it.

On your way to work, you grab breakfast from one of the dozen coffee shops you pass. Most of the goods you buy get delivered right to your door. If you live in a large city and have a car, you barely use it, preferring Uber or ride-sharing services. You feel modern. Your parents didn’t do any of this. Most of their meals were consumed at home, and they took their cars everywhere, in particular to purchase all the stuff they needed.

You think of your life as being so different from theirs. It is. You think of this as progress. It isn’t.

We tend to consider social development as occurring in a straight line: we progressed from A to B to C, with each step being more advanced and, we assume, better than the one before. This perception isn’t always accurate, though. Part of learning from the past is appreciating that we humans have tried many different ways to organize ourselves, with lots of repetitions. If we want success now, we need to understand our past efforts in order to see what changes might be needed this time around.

Would you be surprised to learn that in Victorian London (the nineteenth century), the vast majority of people ate their food on the run? That ride sharing was common? Or that you could purchase everything you needed without ever leaving your house?

To be fair, these situations didn’t exist in the exact instantiations that they do today. Obviously, there was no amazon.com back then. But while the parallels are not exact, they are worth exploring, if only to remind us that no matter the array of pressures we face as a society, there are only so many ways we can organize ourselves.

To start with, street food was the norm. All classes except the very wealthy (thus, essentially, anyone who worked) ate on the run. At outdoor stalls or indoor counters. Food purchased from street vendors or chophouses (the Victorian equivalent of fast-food outlets). Food was purchased and consumed outside of the home, on the commute to or from work.

Why? Why would everyone from the middle classes to the working poor eat out?

Unlike today, eating out was cheaper then. As Judith Flanders explains in The Victorian City:

Today, eating out is more expensive than cooking at home, but in the nineteenth century the situation was reversed. Most of the working class lived in rooms, not houses. They might have had access to a communal kitchen, but more often they cooked in their own fireplace: to boil a kettle before going to work, leaving the fire to burn when there was no one home, was costly, time-consuming and wasteful. … Several factors — the lack of storage space, routine infestations of vermin and being able, because of the cost, to buy food only in tiny quantities — meant that storing any foodstuff, even tea, overnight was unusual.

Even food delivery isn’t new.

Every eating place expected to deliver meals, complete with cutlery, dishes and even condiments, which were brought by waiters who then stayed on, if wanted, to serve. Endless processions of meals passed through the streets daily. … Large sums of money were not necessary for this service.

People need to eat. It’s fundamental. No matter what living conditions we find ourselves in, the drive away from starvation means that we are willing to experiment in how we organize to get our food.

Public transportation took hold in Victorian London and is another interesting point of comparison. Then, its use was not due to a sense of civic responsibility or concerns about the environment. Public transportation succeeded because it was faster. Most cities had grown organically, and streets were not designed for the volume they had to carry in the nineteenth century. There was no flow, and there were no traffic rules. The population was swelling and road surfaces would be devastating to today’s SUVs. It was simply painful to get anywhere.

Thus the options exploded. Buses and cabs to get about the city. Stagecoaches and the railroad for longer excursions (and commutes!). And the Underground. Buses “increased the average speed of travel to nearly six miles an hour; with the railway this figure rose to over twelve, sometimes double that.” Public transportation allowed people to move faster, and “therefore, areas that had traditionally been on the edges of London now housed commuters.”

As a direct consequence of the comparable efficiency of the public transportation system, “most people could not imagine ever owning a private carriage. It was not just the cost of the carriage itself, of the horse and its accoutrements — harnesses and so on — but the running costs: the feed and care of the horse, the stabling, as well as the taxes that were imposed on carriages throughout the century.” As well as the staff. A driver, footmen, their salaries and uniforms.

A form of ride-sharing was also common then. For travel outside of the city, one could hire a post-chaise. “A post-chaise was always hired privately, to the passenger’s own schedule, but the chaise, horses, driver and postboys all belonged to the coaching inn or a local proprietor.”

Aside from the cost of owning your own transportation, neither the work day nor the city infrastructure was designed for reliance on individual transport. London in the nineteenth century (and to a large extent today) functioned better with an extensive public transport system.

There was no social safety net. You worked or you died.

Finally, living in London in the nineteenth century was very much about survival. There was no social safety net. You worked or you died. And given the concentration of wealth in the top tier of society, there was a lot of competition among the working poor for a slight edge that would mean the difference between living another day and starvation.

This situation is likely part of the reason that sellers went to buyers, rather than the other way around. Unlike today, when so many bookstores are owned by the same company or when a conglomerate makes multiple brands of “unique” luxury goods, a watercress girl owned and sold only the watercress she could carry. And this watercress was no different from the bundles the girl one street over had. The competition to sell was fierce.

And so, as Flanders describes, in the first half of the nineteenth century, street vendors in all neighborhoods sold an astonishing array of goods and services. First chimney sweeps, then milkmaids; “the next sellers were the watercress girls, followed by the costermongers, then the fishmongers’, the butchers’ and the bakers’ boys to take the daily orders.” Next came the guy selling horsemeat.

You didn’t have to leave your house to purchase items for meeting your daily needs.

This is not to say that Victorian London had everything figured out or that progress is always a loop. For example, there is no time in history in which it was better to be a woman than it is now, and modern medicine and the scientific method are significant steps up over what has come before. But reading these accounts of how London functioned almost two hundred years ago hints that a lot of what we consider modern innovations have been tried before.

Maybe ways of organizing come and go depending on time and place. When things are useful, they appear; as needs change, those things disappear. There really is no new way of doing business.

But we can look at the impact of social progress, how it shapes communities, and what contributes to its ebb and flow. Flanders notes that in the second half of the nineteenth century, there was a shift to going out to shop in stores. What changes did this give rise to? And how did those changes contribute to the loop we are experiencing and to our current desire to have everything brought to us?

“Image: The Trojan Horse. Your guile is hidden inside a magnificent gift that proves irresistible to your opponent. The walls open. Once inside, wreak havoc.”
— Robert Greene, The 48 Laws of Power

***

The Basics

The story of the Trojan Horse is perhaps the most famous of all the Greek myths.

The Trojan War had been going on for a decade, with no end in sight and many Greek heroes dying, when Odysseus came up with an idea that won the war for the Greeks.

Because the Trojans considered horses to be sacred, the Greeks built a large, hollow wooden horse. To make it even more irresistible, they used wood from Cornel trees (also sacred) to construct it. Odysseus and a group of men hid inside while the rest of the Greek army pretended to leave the area, destroying their camp and boarding their ships.

After some debate as to whether the Greeks could be trusted, the Trojans dragged the giant horse inside the walls of the city. The end of the ten-year siege was a huge relief to the people of Troy, who spent the night celebrating.

By midnight, everyone was in a drunken stupor. Odysseus then acted, signaling to the Greek fleet to return and leading his men out of the Trojan Horse to kill the unsuspecting guards and open the doors. The Greeks then had access to the city. They massacred the Trojans, keeping a few alive as slaves. Some of the soldiers traveled further afield, forming settlements which are supposed to have led to the creation of Rome.

Ancient Greeks saw this myth as factual, with the events occurring between 1300–1200 BC in the area near Dardanelles.

There is some archeological evidence for the existence of Troy, although most historians now accept that the story is mythological. There is probably still some basis in actual events, as sieges were common during that era.

Myth or not, the fact that the story of the Trojan Horse has survived for over 3,000 years indicates its power and utility as a mental model.

Why, exactly, has this particular story retained its grip on our imagination for so long?

We can only speculate as to why. Perhaps the answer lies in the fact that the Trojan Horse is not just a story. It's also a parable, a metaphor, an invitation to be ingenious, an example of out-of-the-box thinking.

Reading it has sparked so many ideas for so many people. It is at once practical and bizarre.

Using it as a mental model, we can apply the Trojan Horse story to an array of disciplines and situations. As a concept, it can be used for both good and evil.

The Trojan Horse in Marketing and Business

We live in an era when we are all besieged by marketing messages every moment of the day. Like the Trojans hiding in their city, we have learned to shut these messages out — we use advertisement blockers, throw away junk mail unopened, ignore billboards, and filter out spam emails.

In order to gain our attention, marketers often use a technique similar to the Trojan Horse. They offer people an apparent gift — a free ebook, a discount card, a sample. Only once this item has been enjoyed can its real purpose can be enacted.

A good heuristic when things seem too good to be true is to just forget about them.

Many marketing lessons can be found in the original myth.

The Greeks chose a form which appealed to their targets, using a sacred creature and type of wood. Likewise, marketers must fit their gift to the audience, making it appealing to their basic interests. The Greeks used innovative thinking, inventing a tactic which was new and therefore unexpected. If they had tried the same thing again, it would have had no effect.

Once a marketing technique is recognizable, its impact wanes. No one is going to click on a “5 ways to kill belly fat” pop-up anymore, or fall for an email from a Nigerian prince telling you just how much money you left there, or enjoy a free executable file that will clean your computer. These ruses are now well known and we ignore them. But when these techniques were new and unfamiliar, huge numbers of people were attracted by the offers.

Some examples of Trojan Horse marketing include:

Offering the first chapter of a book for free to people who join an email list — Having read the chapter and received more emails which connect them to the author, people are more likely to buy the full book than they would have been if they had only seen an advert.

Creating free high-quality blog content for an audience to enjoy — Once people are interested in the blogger's voice and expertise, the marketing can begin. Many people will at some point want to support the person whose work they have been consuming for free. This support might include buying courses, books, or consulting services or donating to a Patreon page. We developed the learning community as not only a bunch of extras for people but also a means to support the free content we provide.

Writing a book detailing an expert's specialized knowledge — While sales of the book are often not high, having it published benefits the expert's business. For example, Ryan Holiday has stated that his books have led to more income from speaking and consulting than from actual book sales.

Making the most income from revenue streams which do not appear to be the main objective of a business — For example, high-fashion brands often make more money from perfume than from clothing, cinemas rely on sales of popcorn and drinks, and some restaurants profit predominantly from sales of alcohol.

Creating viral branded content which people share and engage with due to its being interesting and often amusing — For example, just try to watch the Android “Friends Furever” video without forwarding it to at least one person. The adorable video wraps up a marketing message, making people more likely to pay attention to it.

In his book Permission Marketing, Seth Godin discusses the idea under a different name. When you let people into your inbox, you're letting people into your city. They might be there for good or bad reasons; it's hard to know in advance. In a blog post, Godin explains how the concept works:

Permission marketing is the privilege (not the right) of delivering anticipated, personal, and relevant messages to people who actually want to get them.

It recognizes the new power of the best consumers to ignore marketing. It realizes that treating people with respect is the best way to earn their attention.

Pay attention is a key phrase here, because permission marketers understand that when someone chooses to pay attention they are actually paying you with something precious…

Real permission works like this: if you stop showing up, people complain, they ask where you went…

Permission is like dating. You do not start by asking for the sale at first impression. You earn the right, over time, bit by bit…

In order to get permission, you make a promise. You say, “I will do x, y and z, I hope you will give me permission by listening.” And then, this is the hard part, that's all you do. You do not assume you can do more. You do not sell the list or rent the list or demand more attention…

In the book, Godin explains how Amazon has used permission marketing to build an empire:

Using permission, Amazon can fundamentally reconfigure the entire book industry, disintermediating and combining every step of the chain until there are only two: the writer and Amazon … Amazon appears to be building a permission asset, not a brand asset.

Amazon began by offering cheap books. Once people fell for that initial Trojan Horse, Amazon offered them other products and gradually captured more and more of their online spending. Services such as Prime, Echo, and Kindle are contained within the Trojan Horse — that first cheap purchase someone makes.

Just as the Greeks invested effort into building the horse, Amazon has invested millions in technology and infrastructure. This is the essence of Trojan Horse marketing: offering a gift (with Amazon, this includes free trials, discounts, and generally low costs for popular items) and then upselling and upselling and upselling.

On the topic of Amazon Prime, John Warrillow writes:

Like many subscription models, Amazon Prime is a Trojan horse that is expanding the list of products consumers are willing to buy from Amazon and giving the eggheads in Seattle a mountain of customer data to sift through.

The Trojan Horse and the Benjamin Franklin Effect

Let’s say there is a person who dislikes you — a lot. It’s fine; this happens to all of us.

But what if you need to form an allegiance with this person? Or maybe they don’t dislike you, they just don’t know you. Either way, you need to build a relationship with them.

What should you do? Ask them out for coffee, offer a gift, ask someone for an email introduction?

One solution is to utilize the Benjamin Franklin effect, essentially a sort of Trojan Horse approach to building relationships.

The Benjamin Franklin effect is a psychological phenomenon in which we begin to like people we have done favors for. Essentially, the initial favor is the Trojan Horse, containing within it a relationship. Franklin’s original story, told in his autobiography, details how he used this during his time as a legislator:

Having heard that he [a rival who disliked Franklin] had in his library a certain very scarce and curious book, I wrote a note to him, expressing my desire of perusing that book, and requesting he would do me the favour of lending it to me for a few days. He sent it immediately, and I return'd it in about a week with another note, expressing strongly my sense of the favour.

When we next met in the House, he spoke to me (which he had never done before), and with great civility; and he ever after manifested a readiness to serve me on all occasions, so that we became great friends, and our friendship continued to his death.

We can use Franklin’s technique as a Trojan Horse to gain the respect, friendship, and cooperation of other people.

Asking someone for a favor indicates that we already respect them and consider them to have something we lack — a form of flattery which serves as the gift. Once they have accepted this and performed the favor, it can be leveraged.

Examples of the conjunction between the Benjamin Franklin effect and the Trojan Horse include:

Salesmen use the foot-in-the-door technique. This involves making a small request (for example, filling in a survey), then trying to sell you something.

If someone you know has a particular area of expertise, try texting or emailing them (rather than Googling it) whenever you have a related question. One Reddit user on r/LifeProTips recommends texting your mother simple questions on a regular basis to strengthen the relationship. Doing so indicates to people that we consider them knowledgeable, making them more likely to respond to larger requests.

Robert Greene also recommends a number of Trojan Horse–style tactics in The 48 Laws of Power, concealing true intentions within a facade and using specific behavior to achieve goals.

Use selective honesty and judgment to disarm … One sincere and honest move will cover over dozens of dishonest ones. Open-hearted gestures of honesty and generosity bring down the guard of even the most suspicious people. Once your selective honesty opens a hole in their armor, you can deceive and manipulate them at will. A timely gift—a Trojan horse—will serve the same purpose.

[B]efriend your enemies, worming your way into their hearts and minds. As your targets’ friend, you will naturally learn their needs and insecurities, the soft interior they try so hard to hide. The guard will come down with a friend. And even later on, when you play out your treacherous intentions, the lingering resonance of your friendship will still confuse them, letting you keep on manipulating them by toying with their emotions or pushing them into overreactions. For a more immediate effect, you can try a sudden act of kindness and generosity that gets people to lower their defenses—the Trojan Horse strategy. …

When confronted by something difficult or thorny, do not be distracted or discouraged by its formidable outer appearance; think your way into the soft core, the center from which the problem blossoms… Knowing the problem’s core gives you great power to change it from the inside out. Your first thought must always be to infiltrate the center… never to whale away at the periphery or just pound at the walls.

How Artists Change Your Mind

Many artists (a term used here to denote anyone who creates something, not just those who paint canvases) have used their work to conceal important agendas.

The Beatles, Bob Dylan, and Conor Oberst wrap political and social messages within beautiful music.

Bloggers such as Seth Godin and James Altucher envelop key life lessons and paradigm-altering concepts within humorous anecdotes and metaphors. The women who embroidered the Bayeux Tapestry added their own subtle views to the panoramas of war and victory.

Companies such as Toms, Ben & Jerry, and Lush use the popularity of their products to fund real change. Johannes Vermeer's most serene paintings tell complex, taboo narratives.

Consider Gatsby, throwing lavish parties with the sole purpose of attracting Daisy back to him. This is the essence of much of art — an attractive and appealing exterior conceals the true purpose.

People use whatever means are available to them to express their views and attitudes. Sometimes this is intentional; sometimes the Trojan Horse is built unconsciously. The purpose is to get a message across in a form which is palatable to people.

Few of us enjoy or engage with straightforward expressions of a particular agenda. But when it comes in an interesting form, we pull the wooden horse within the city walls with glee. Just as with marketing messages, we have become desensitized to these sorts of messages. Artists must now use ingenuity and creativity to spread their ideas.

As Walter Hamady writes:

The book as a structure is the Trojan horse of art — it is not feared by average people. It is a familiar form in the world, and average people will take it from you and examine it whereas a painting, poem, sculpture, or print they will not.

This concept of art as a Trojan Horse is extremely important.

Farnam Street itself serves as a Trojan Horse. Our intention is to spread an appreciation of the importance of clear thinking, lifelong learning, making good decisions and living a meaningful life.

If upon your first visit to this site, you had found nothing but a list of instructions, the chances are high that you would have ignored it and never returned. Through the use of stories, analogies and careful explorations of important ideas, this agenda has reached and inspired many people. When you read a post about a military tactic or the life of a historic figure, the purpose is not the narrative alone. It is about much more than that — a way of changing how people think.

In Contagious, Jonah Berger explains the power of stories as a Trojan Horse:

People don’t just share information, they tell stories. But just like the epic tale of the Trojan Horse, stories are vessels that carry things such as morals and lessons. Information travels under the guise of what seems like idle chatter. So, we need to build our own Trojan horses, embedding our products and ideas in stories that people want to tell… we need to make our message so integral to the narrative that people can’t tell the story without it.

Francis T. Marchese also advocates the Trojan Horse approach to art:

The Trojan Horse is an artifact that possesses a host of hidden agendas. Rather than presenting a one-off manifestation, the Trojan Horse offers many platoons, capable of strategically addressing the wider culture, pointing to replicable solutions through demonstration. Thus, an artwork acting like a Trojan Horse can contain the seeds of multiple strategic outcomes.

In short, when we want to spread an idea or spark change, we would do well to learn from the ancient Greeks.

People have strong defenses against anything which challenges their worldviews. By packaging it in a format which appeals to them, we can pass on meaning. Artists, marketers, and politicians (among others) have long realized the importance of this approach. It is a means of injecting our ideas, both good and bad, into people’s worlds through an apparent gift.